Baldwin Park Polishes Tarnished Anti-Gang Image

Cruising past Sierra Vista High School in a blue, unmarked sedan, Baldwin Park Police Detective Mike Donovan spotted a teen-ager in street-tough clothes whom he’d never seen before.

He pulled up alongside him and called for the boy, a 16-year-old named Jorge wearing his shirt buttoned at the neck and open at the waist, to come take a seat on the curb.

“Who do you hang with?” Donovan asked.

“The Rascals,” said Jorge, referring to a clique of the city’s large and frequently violent Eastside Bolen gang.

“How’s what’s-his-face who got shot in the leg?” Donovan asked, meanwhile checking the two initials tattooed on Jorge’s left hand.

“You mean Goofy,” said Jorge, adding that his buddy just got out of juvenile hall.

“You staying out of trouble?” Donovan asked.

“Yeah,” Jorge said, grinning.

“OK,” said Donovan, jotting this down for future reference. “It’s been nice talking with you.”

With that, Jorge became suspected gang member No. 873 in the Hewlett-Packard computer that was given to Baldwin Park police three years ago as part of a state-funded gang activity and prevention program, dubbed GAP.

Police say the program, which was recently renewed for a fourth year by the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning, gives them the personnel and technology they need to begin quelling the gangs that for generations have warred in this predominantly Latino city of 63,000.

The computer is programmed so a profile of every gang member-police encounter can be called up by punching in the kind of sketchy information a witness might provide, such as a detail about a scar or tattoo or moniker.

An additional grant that has averaged $50,000 annually has allowed the city for the first time to hire a detective, in this case the nine-year veteran Donovan, to work full time as a gang investigator.

“Generally, what we do is very low-level and non-threatening,” Donovan said, shortly after his exchange the other day with Jorge. “But it lets them know we’re out here.”

These are the kinds of gains that police fear may have been overshadowed when city officials accused former Police Chief Richard A. Hoskin of knowingly exaggerating the success of the GAP program, which has won the department both state and national honors.

Hoskin, who was fired Oct. 30 by the City Council over “incompatibility of management philosophy,” had stated in applications to several awards committees that from fiscal year 1986-87 to 1987-88 the program helped reduce the number of gang-related incidents in the city by 53%.

However, city and police officials said that two separate investigations concluded that gang activity had been reduced by 19% during that period and that Hoskin had been told by his officers that the higher figure was incorrect.

The discrepancy between the two figures initially resulted from inexperienced personnel and was not intentional, officials said. But they added that Hoskin had been alerted to the problem before the program was honored by the League of California Cities and the National League of Cities at conferences last year.

“I’m sure it’s something the city feels embarrassed about,” said Clark Goecker, assistant director of the League of California Cities. “But we’re not going to make an issue over it. Even though the statistics may have been inaccurate, the program itself still probably deserved recognition.”

Indeed, police said that by the middle of 1988, after the first two years of the program, they had made modest reductions in the number of reported gang-related incidents, which fell from 418 to 349. During the same period, gang arrests had also dropped from 200 to 152.

“Even if it didn’t produce spectacular results, it still produced results,” Donovan said. “If we can drop those numbers down even a little bit it’s worth it.”

During 1988-89, however, those figures have crept back up to 423 gang-related incidents and 219 gang arrests--a slight increase over numbers from the first year of the program.

Police, who still think gang activity is on the decline, say the increases are a reflection of heightened awareness and better reporting methods.

“We can identify more crimes now that are gang-related,” said Lt. Mike Bennett, the department’s spokesman. “We’re more sophisticated. We reach for everything we can.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dennis Ferris, who prosecutes most of Baldwin Park’s gang shootings, said such numbers are often deceiving anyway, because gang activity tends to run in unpredictable and uneven cycles.

Nonetheless, Ferris said the city’s computer bank and beefed-up patrols have helped make positive strides in getting some of the most violent gangsters behind bars.

“It’s real hard to measure,” Ferris said. “But they’re definitely on the right track.”